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Review Summary

This tender portrait of late-1960's French youth stars Louis Garrel as François, a 20-year-old Parisian struggling through the fires of revolutionary promise and its smoldering remains. Written and directed by his father, the celebrated auteur Philippe Garrel, the film begins with a handful of gangling young men sharing a pipe filled with hashish and talking of poetry. It is early 1968 in Paris, moments before the revolution or, rather, moments before that nearly forgotten flashpoint when cities across the world lighted up with radical promise and burning cars. Soon after the film opens, François and his friends exit their narcotic haze and almost instantly take to the newly formed barricades, replacing one dream with another. Idealistic and naïve - one would-be Communard solemnly wonders if this can be "a revolution for the working class despite the working class" - these would-be insurgents fight with ideas and gestures that seem confused, at times haphazard, but their optimism has delivered them into a state of grace. The older Mr. Garrel was himself all of 20 when Paris erupted that shocking May, and this achingly poignant film is a testament to that time as well as somewhat of a memento mori. It is also, unabashedly, a rejoinder to the perfume-ad aesthetics of Bernardo Bertolucci's fiction about the same period, "The Dreamers," which also starred the younger Mr. Garrel. After the fires die, François and the rest retreat into a rambling mansion where the wealthy young owner, stretched on a bed like a latter-day Coleridge, volunteers that his own revolution arrived when he inherited his riches. Cosseted by faded luxury, these children of paradise make love and art, and listen to Nico through wisps of opium smoke. The beauty of the film - the shimmering black-and-white tones and the purity of the compositions at once austere and harmonious - suggests that the director sees this layover less as a retreat into narcissism than a necessary journey into the self. As 1968 gave way to 1969, it was still uncertain whether they had been permanently defeated or were just stoking the flames within - too early to gauge whether idealism would survive such a crushing defeat. We know what happened next, for better and for worse. And while the film's desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and may have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost. — Manohla Dargis